Hawker Beechcraft Issues Another Round of Layoffs

If it seems to you like the name Hawker Beechcraft has come up a fair number of times on this site then you would be right. It seems like they have done their fair share of layoffs in order to make their budgets come out right. You mat recall back in April of this year when the company, “… gave layoff notices to 350 workers in a bid to spend more in order to reduce the bottom line. The notices are not immediate effect and workers will have 60 days until they are out of a job.” The last job cuts before that were back in November of 2011, when the company decided to send out, “…layoff WARN notices came to three hundred workers in the aviation field. As you may already know a WARN notice is not a pink slip, but a notification that a pink slip will be coming in the near future.” Before that, in September of 2010 the management of Hawker Beechcraft  decided to, “letting go of 350 salaried employees in Wichita, Kansas.  Wichita, the self-titled “Air Capital of the World,” has recently suffered other layoffs to the industry.  Chief Executive Officer William Boisture states that the job loss can be attributed to low demand for aircraft, and that for the next year, there appears to be no upturn in the market.”

It looks like this time the company is getting ready to get rid of another round of workers. The company has decided to send layoff notices to about 150 of its hourly and non-hourly employees. That level of layoffs is enough to qualify under the current federal guide lines as a mass layoff action. For those of you who are not familiar with the idea of a mass layoff action here is a look at how the federal government defines the term, “…mass layoff actions that result in workers being separated from their jobs. Monthly mass layoff numbers are from establishments which have at least 50 initial claims for unemployment insurance (UI) filed against them during a 5-week period. Extended mass layoff numbers (issued quarterly) are from a subset of such establishments—where private sector nonfarm employers indicate that 50 or more workers were separated from their jobs for at least 31 days.”

The company has sent a WARN notice, which means that the workers will have about 60 days to find new positions, or transfer onto the unemployment rolls. While that may seem like a decent amount of time in the current job market that span of time will likely be insufficient for the majority of the soon to be displaced workers.

On Friday the company sent out a letter to impacted workers in which CEO Steve Miller and Chairman Bill Boisture said the following to the workers, “As we continue the process of balancing our production levels to market demand, we face the difficult task of making additional changes to previously planned schedules and resizing our work force.”